What could be worse than seeing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showering while his wife promoted her line of body creams on Instagram?
That’d be Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s field trip on Wednesday to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador to film herself in front of Venezuelan immigrants deported and detained there from America without due process, according to John Oliver in his monologue for Last Week Tonight, calling Noem’s stunt inside El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) a “hideous victory lap.”
“OK. The visual alone there is deeply disturbing,” Oliver said. “Using caged prisoners with shaved heads as a backdrop is a bold choice given—you know—history. And it’s now the most appalling use of a front-facing video from anyone in this administration, even surpassing the time Cheryl Hines hawked body cream in front of a nude RFK Jr. showing off his wet armpits. And I do not say that lightly.”
Oliver found Noem’s stunt especially disturbing because some of the imprisoned men had been deported on “the flimsiest of charges.” One Venezuelan man had sought asylum in the U.S., only to be sent to the El Salvador prison based on ICE documents riddled with mistakes, misidentifying him by both name and gender, as well as giving him multiple ID numbers.
“This is clearly a total mess,” Oliver said.
He also criticized Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan for suggesting on ABC’s This Week that the immigrants didn’t deserve due process.
“That’s not how the justice system works,” Oliver said, referencing The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gives everyone in America the right to due process. “That’s it!” Oliver said. “It doesn’t then add in the small print, ‘Unless they seem guilty by association to man who looks like Buzz Lightyear drowned a few days ago.‘”
Oliver said the first months of the second Trump administration have been full of “incompetence,” “cruelty” and “occasional Nazi-adjacent visuals.” Last week’s revelation that Trump’s entire national security team invited an editor from The Atlantic to follow along on Signal as they openly planned to bomb Yemen is just another example, Oliver said, of them being “deeply unserious people doing deeply stupid things with massively serious consequences.”
Oliver concluded: “The good news is, they’re facing major pushback from federal courts over their mass deportations. The bad news is, they’ve already done a ton of damage. But if they think they can brush off illegally detaining and imprisoning innocent people with the same flippancy they reserve for adding the wrong person to a group chat, they should know in no uncertain terms that the rest of us will push back hard. Or to put it in the language they seem to prefer: Go (emoji of man running ) f— (emoji of middle finger) yourselves (emoji of finger pointing back) a–holes (emoji of peach and hole), love (heart emoji) America (flag emoji).”
